


with shadows and monsters

by NGHTWING



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, Blood, Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, No Dialogue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:02:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28378920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NGHTWING/pseuds/NGHTWING
Summary: There are humans, and then there are monsters.And then there are stories of men who turn themselves into monsters. Stories of men who cut their hearts out, willing to give them away so that from the gaping hole inside their chests emerges something viscous, something hungry and foul.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	with shadows and monsters

There are humans, and then there are monsters. 

And then there are stories of men who turn themselves into monsters. Stories of men who cut their hearts out, willing to give them away so that from the gaping hole inside their chests emerges something viscous, something hungry and foul. 

Those are not the stories you tell to children at night. 

Those are the stories you tell in the dark, when you know something is sitting right beside you, the stories you say out loud before you die, so that it knows that you know what it is before it’s maw closes in around you. 

There are men before there are monsters, and boys before there are men. 

And boys had never known monsters, they’d known warm, happy hugs. And loving hands and gentle words from mother and father, laughter all around them. But boys grow up, eventually, quickly, and turn into men and from there it’s just a single step further before monsters are born. 

Fathers turn to monsters too, they offer up their hearts and from the hole in their chests comes out something cold, something angry that tears everything to shreds and from then onwards it doesn’t matter how many smiles or how many hugs had happened, because the monster will claw at your ribcage hungry for your heart. 

Out comes a hunter, and a scholar and a not—quite—boy, not—quite man turned soldier to slay the beast. But not—quite—boys, not—quite—men and fathers have something in common don’t they? Eventually they’ll all cut out their hearts and have something crawl its way into the world, something that feeds and feeds and feeds on pain and is always hungry. 

The monster shivers, he cries into his clawed hand and keens, a high pitched sound filled with pain—grief—shame as his body tries to heal itself. The monster curls itself up on the floor of the childhood bed of a boy who exists no longer and tries with little success to stop. 

* * *

Alucard dresses the corpses back up. He was never privy to his—, to Dracula’s methods before Lisa of Lupu started banging knife’s pommels on his door, but he finds just staking naked bodies on his doorstep to be distasteful. The monster that is now Alucard finds himself wondering how it must’ve looked when Lisa walked up to the old castle surrounded by death. 

The blood drips rhythmically onto the ground, gravity pulls it downward and it soaks the ground the stakes stand on. The sound lulls the monster to sleep at night, the man it pretends to be curled around a blanket feeling something akin to safety. 

( _He liked them, he really did._

_He couldn’t leave them like that, he also couldn’t bring himself to dress them completely. The first time he tried touching their cold bodies had promptly left him shivering and weeping on his bedroom floor until the sun had peeked behind the curtains._

_He clothes Taka first, and then Sumi, and then drives wooden stakes through their bodies with grim satisfaction._ ) 

* * *

Some nights the monster lies awake at night, teeth clenched and hands fisted on its hair because it fights for control, breathing hard with eyes closed because it remembers hands touching him, flower soft fingertips on his skin and rough and calloused hands on his body. 

Some nights the monster’s overpowered and a man comes out to cry. 

Their hands are on his body, their mouths are on his body and Alucard feels his heart racing and his cheeks are hot, and—. There is pain as the binding wraps itself around his body and the adrenaline rushing through his body is not from excitement but from _fear_. 

And in the night, when the moon is high and the wind is strong enough to drown out his voice, the man cries for people who are not there, who might never be again and the things that crawl at night pretend not to listen. 

* * *

The monster is born right there on the blood, ash, tear soaked carpet of the childhood floor. The man’s heart is a beaten, broken thing but it’ll do just nicely. The man sacrificed his heart to himself, let it never be abused again, he asks. 

He devours it, greedy and foul, and what surfaces when Alucard stops crying and manages to get himself on his knees is not something that can be called good anymore. 

Alucard had never considered himself to be human, or vampire. He was both and none at once, his own being. And when his father had turned into that grief maddened thing, he’d relied on his mother’s goodness to guide him away from it. 

There is none of that in him anymore, Alucard trails after his father’s footsteps as he stalks the castle hallways. He understands him now, the need to burn the world down as payment for his shredded heart. 

* * *

_(What would happen, were the monster to see its own reflection and see not a beast but something small and breakable instead?)._

* * *

The hallucinations return with a vengeance. They’re different, but they’re the same. 

It’s in the way he can hear his mother’s skirts and his father’s sure steps on the corridors, the human’s laughter outside as they return from the Belmont hold. They haunt him and he pretends not to hear.

He can’t see their faces, it’s like a punishment. 

They’d not been a problem since before the two humans had shown up in his life, not since the man that he’d been had crafted those two dolls in the likeness of the speaker and the hunter. 

( _Quick, careful hands had ripped the rooms apart, uncaring. Desperately looking for the right materials, racking his memory as he sewed and added details so as to make them as accurate as possible._

_The end result had been kind of sad, kind of funny. They sat with him during meals._ ) 

The dolls burned bright on the fireplace, cloth darkening and turning to ashes as the monster watched. 

* * *

The scars will not fade, no matter how badly the monster applies doctor’s salves and ointments on them, but in the end it doesn’t really matter. They’ll serve as a reminder, just like the first one, of blood and pain and consequences. He’ll bare himself in front of a mirror as if to say “Look at yourself, you fool!” everytime the man tries to fight back for control, everytime weakness tries to escape from his mouth and the tears assault his eyes once again. 

He’ll hold the man he was before by the throat with a vicious, clawed grip and rattle until the neck snaps, and he can go back to being alone once more. 

The monster in Alucard’s skin fishes, and cooks and cuts up vegetables for supper and thinks of the best way to die when the wind changes directions and the familiar smell reaches his kitchen window. 

When there are monsters out come the hunters and the scholars. No sons turned soldier this time, he thinks, as Trevor Belmont’s “what the fuck” echoes through the area. 

That is how stories go. 

The monster will bear its teeth and go down fighting, claws curled protectively around a man and his frightened heart made sacrifice. 

**Author's Note:**

> when i tell yall i went absolutely insane writing this, i really did. merry christmas and happy new year to me specifically


End file.
